Comments for POETICKS

Comment on Entry 639 — A Definition of “Definition” by Geof Huth

Geof Huth — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:52:51 +0000

Usage always wins over definition if there is a conflict between the two. That is merely a fact of language, with millennia of evidence to prove it. Do what you can to hold the language in place, but it will always move, and sometimes furiously so.

Comment on Entry 628 — New Vocational Triumphs by marton koppany

marton koppany — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:28:29 +0000

Good news. Congratulations, Bob!

Comment on Entry 621 — Evolution of Style by marton koppany

marton koppany — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:21:04 +0000

I mean: italicize. The joke is the same.

Comment on Entry 621 — Evolution of Style by marton koppany

marton koppany — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:04:25 +0000

No problem. (I tried to italize the “o” but couldn’t.)

Comment on Entry 621 — Evolution of Style by Bob Grumman

Bob Grumman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:57:30 +0000

Ha, the fact that it was translated into nothing but symbols indicates it was not visual. I think subjective visual interpretations of symbols nice, but not enough, by themselves, to make a poem visual. Otherwise, Frost’s “Stopping by woods” is a visual poem because the o’s look like snowflakes.

Hey, gotta defend my taxonomy to the very end.

Comment on Entry 621 — Evolution of Style by marton koppany

marton koppany — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:38:06 +0000

The unusual use of the punctuation marks (it was even more unusual at the time of the conception of the poem), the unusual emphasis on them (I read them, they’re meaningful, and I also see them: small plants, leaves of grass in the state of potentiality) has a strong “visioaesthetic” effect as well. There’s a playful and liric tension between the shorthand formula, and the suspense in slowing down the reading. It is still one of my favorites and I’m proud it has a Hungarian “translation”.

Comment on How to Appreciate a Mathemaku by Bob Grumman

Bob Grumman — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:32:54 +0000

I give up, Mike–I see no way of making you see that my poems are mathematical, just not entirely mathematical. The dividend shed works the same way in my long division poems as it does in arithmetic. Its mathematical operation is then used metaphorically, but that doesn’t make it not mathematical. In fact, to work as a metaphor it has to remain mathematical.

As for free verse linking with fascism, a politics of slavery, I don’t see it. Again, though, I was not arguing that formal verse and fascism go together, but something else. (See preceding comment.)

Comment on How to Appreciate a Mathemaku by Mike Snider

Mike Snider — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:07:34 +0000

I’ve been thinking a little more about the connections between fascism and Ezra Pound’s dictum “make it new.” There was a sense in the early twentieth century that everything could be remade in more rational form – even, and perhaps especially, human nature. Fascism and Communism were both attempts to do this, despite their very different notions of the Good. Artists from both sides of that divide worked to discover new forms to encourage/model/engage what they felt to be the newly emerging human consciousness, and both sides, both politically and artistically, declared old forms to be “reactionary,” or “bourgeois.” Free verse was most definitely connected with this revolutionary spirit, and formal poetry definitely considered by the revolutionaries on both sides to be an affront to the new orders they respectively desired. Art is always messy, and there were certainly exceptions on both sides, but there is a way in which metrical verse is a celebration of the continuity of the human endeavor while free verse is a deliberate attack on that continuity: “Make it new.” Both Fascism and Communism, and the various poetics of the new poetries, assume that human nature is infinitely malleable — but it is not.

It isn’t as important that there be or not be rules for doing this or making that as it is that what rules there are arise from a delight in and a respect for human capacity and desire as they are revealed in spontaneous human interaction with their world, including the other people in it. Metrical verse, rhyme, and narrative, from their ubiquity in human culture, clearly are genuine expressions of that human capacity and desire.

Of course, so is war. But madrigals don’t kill people.

Comment on How to Appreciate a Mathemaku by Mike Snider

Mike Snider — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:47:01 +0000

Bob, three messages back the “the mathematical elements are … mathematical, not ‘quasi-mathematical’,” now it’s “mathematics used metaphorically.” Which is it? And, for the life of me, I can’t see what difference it makes to substitute “potential”for “agility.” Mathematics is a formal system defined in such a way that the outcome of a set of operations performed on a particular set of properly formed inputs will necessarily produce such-and-such a set of results. Metaphors don’t work that way. Poetry doesn’t work that way.

I would never claim that what you do is not art — it’s sometimes very good art, which is all any of us can hope for. But it certainly isn’t mathematics, and while it sits fairly comfortably next to more traditional poetry, it should be no surprise to you that poets generally don’t feel it has much to do with their work — no more than you think sonnets have much to do with your work.

Comment on How to Appreciate a Mathemaku by Bob Grumman

Bob Grumman — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:23:23 +0000

The dividend shed is mathematics used metaphorically. As for the basketball equation, what I want to know is what you take it as, not how valid you think it. Is it in any way mathematical? But change “agility” to “potential,” if you want a greater degree of validity.